The diary of a CTO

eCommerce UK Linkedin Group M-Commerce Pecha Kucha Video

richardyeo — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 13:03:21 +0000

Back in December I presented at the eCommerce UK Linkedin Group M-Commerce Pecha Kucha event.

The videos from the event can be found here…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZI901waR8U

The slides for the event can be found here.

http://www.slideshare.net/MartinNewman/pecha-kucha-presentations

My presentation starts at slide 114

Hadoop

richardyeo — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:59:48 +0000

I recently bought Hadoop: The Definitive Guide Second Edition from O’Reilly.

The book is pretty good and gives a good overview of Hadoop and its family of projects

MapReduce (a distributed data processing model and execution environment that runs on large clusters of commodity machines)
HDFS (is an abstraction layer for multiple filesystems and a distributed filesystem that runs on large clusters of commodity machines)
Avro (an efficient serialization system for cross-language RPC, and persistent data storage)
Pig (a data flow language and execution environment for exploring very large datasets)
Hive (SQL like language which is translated to MapReduce jobs)
HBase (a distributed column-oriented(family) database which uses HDFS)
Zookeeper (a distributed, highly available coordination service)
Sqoop (a tool for efficiently moving data between relational databases and HDFS)

I can see Hadoop being useful for certain scenarios but the datasets would have to be huge and growing quickly. A commodity server, running an RDBMS, these days can be 48 cores and 1TB of RAM. That’s pretty powerful. It also depends on how the data is to be used. If the data can be summarised / aggregated daily then this can be efficiently stored within an RDBMS.

The book does include some good case studies. If you are looking to learn about Hadoop and its family of projects then this is a good book.

PrimeLocation iPhone app

richardyeo — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 20:24:15 +0000

We have just released a PrimeLocation iPhone app. It includes camera view (Augmented Reality) feature.

Smart TV / Connected TV apps

richardyeo — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:11:15 +0000

We are in the process of building Smart TV / Connected TV apps for FindaProperty and PrimeLocation. This isn’t without its challenges due to different manufacturer platforms although we have a solution to this problem. They’ll be launching soon for, Samsung, LG, Philips, etc. The Connected TV market is bigger than people think and growing very quickly, i.e. hundreds of millions of devices.

eCommerce UK Linkedin Group M-Commerce Pecha Kucha

richardyeo — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:20:55 +0000

I presented on M-Commerce at the recent eCommerce UK Linkedin Group event on the 29th November. It was a great event and very well organised. The turnout was brilliant and there was a large interested audience.

Switch from non-geographic to geographic numbers

richardyeo — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:09:20 +0000

We have just migrated our customers from non-geographic telephone numbers to geographic telephone numbers. It should increase the number of leads our customers receive significantly.

Butler

richardyeo — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:35:14 +0000

I met a fellow IT Director for lunch yesterday. I couldn’t believe his company (a retailer) had a butler for the leadership team. This was in addition to personal assistants!

Presentation on near-shoring

richardyeo — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:31:35 +0000

I presented on near-shoring at a QuickStartGlobal customer event yesterday. There were lots of good questions from the audience. Judging by the feedback people were very happy with my presentation with 80% rating it excellent and 20% rating it very good.

Android Apps

richardyeo — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:29:35 +0000

We have recently launched Android apps for FindaProperty and PrimeLocation.

FindaProperty Android App
PrimeLocation Android App

FindaProperty Mobile Website launched

richardyeo — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 12:09:07 +0000

Today we launched a dedicated website for mobile users of FindaProperty.com. The new website can be found at http://m.findaproperty.com.